Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Today is Jeremiah's 30th birthday. Olivia and I are so blessed to live this life with him. He is such an amazing husband and daddy. One thing we love is that he constantly makes us laugh! I look forward to seeing Jeremiah become a daddy to two kids. Our little boy is so lucky to have Jeremiah as his daddy!! Today also marks another important event. We sent off our dossier this evening!!! Jeremiah, Olivia, and I went to the post office and sent it off together. I'm such a dork (I know!:)) because I made us all go together as a family and even had someone take our picture (I will post it another day). I told Jeremiah that I wanted to capture this special event. It has taken us almost 5 months to prepare our dossier and we are so thankful to be done with this part of the journey. When I was pregnant with Olivia we had multiple sonogram pictures and I took weekly belly pictures. It makes me sad that we don't have these pictures for our little guy. So, I am trying to take pictures of all the exciting steps in our journey. This is the reason I made our entire family go to the post office to take a picture of us sending over our dossier. I want our little boy to see how excited we were to send this over and to feel just as special as Olivia does. Here is where our dossier will go now:1. The Assistant Stork in Virginia-they will take our dossier to the Ethiopian Embassy to get it authenticated.2. The Assistant Stork sends our dossier to CHI (our agency). 3. CHI sends our dossier (along with two other photocopies of our documents) to Ethiopia!

After the dossier is in Ethiopia we will be placed on a waiting to list to be matched with a child. We are celebrating both special events at our house tonight.:)

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

I'm holding back tears as I write this post. We got our I-171h in the mail today. It only took one week. We've heard of people waiting for months to receive this document. God is good! It's hard to explain to other people how much time and energy has gone into preparing our dossier and this document is the LAST piece of paperwork for our dossier. So, what's the next step? We will take this document and two other documents to our local bank to get them notarized. After that we will take two of those documents to Springfield to get them certified. Once we've completed these tasks.....we will send off our dossier to Ethiopia! We are beyond thrilled to be at this step in our adoption journey. We would love for you to keep praying for our journey. We both know that it will be tough to be patient as we wait for a referral. In addition to praying for us, I would love for you to pray for my friends Mike and Brandy King. They are adopting a sweet little girl named Abi from Ethiopia. They went to meet her in July and are just waiting for the Embassy in Ethiopia to accept their paperwork. Pray specifically that they can bring Abi home soon and that their paperwork is accepted the FIRST time it is submitted to the court. During the past few months numerous people have had their paperwork rejected the first time (and multiple times in some cases) before it is accepted. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it!:)